In a round table partner discussion last week at Microcorp’s One on One in Atlanta, newbies to SD-WAN were learning from the partners who have been selling SD-WAN for more than a year.
One question was What triggers an SD-WAN sale (if the business isn’t already shopping for it)? There were 4 factors:
1. The business has rolled out another cloud application (like an upgrade to Microsoft Teams). This would put added stress on the Internet feed and reduce traffic on the MPLS.
2. It is time to renew licenses for firewalls. At this time, the business could shift that budget item to an SD-WAN deployment. Most SD-WAN providers have firewall options.
3. If the business migrated to UCaaS or Contact Center and are experiencing poor call quality or poor performance (of any cloud app really), then SD-WAN should be discussed as a way to improve performance, improve network resilience and add redundancy.
4. Are there any mission critical apps that the business must access every minute? Where is that application housed?
And 4.5, if the business is expanding, they can utilize SD-WAN to augment their existing MPLS network.